The Waiting Itself
When the ground says no
February is a month that withholds. It shows you the garden you’ll have—eventually—but won’t let you touch it yet. The soil is frozen into something closer to pavement than earth. The beds lie under snow, frost, or both, sealed off like a crime scene. The light is returning, technically, but it hasn’t started telling the truth about spring.
I stand at the window, coffee going cold in my hands, and stare at the yard the way you stare at a locked door you know you’ll be allowed through—just not today. Not this week. Maybe not this month. Especially in this zero-degree weather.
The seed catalogs have arrived. They come in waves starting in January, each one more pornographic than the last. Glossy heirloom tomatoes. Dahlias the size of dinner plates. Peas that promise to climb trellises I haven’t built yet. I dog-ear pages. I make lists. I add things to my cart and then close the browser.
But I keep opening the catalogs anyway. I keep touching the pages. It’s the only part of gardening I can do right now—the imagining, the planning, the fantasy of a garden that doesn’t exist yet but might. It’s foreplay without the payoff. February as a long, cold tease.
My hands want dirt. They want the specific give of good soil, the way it crumbles and holds and smells like something alive waking up. They want the grit under my nails, the ache in my forearms from turning beds, the small violence of pulling weeds that come up root and all. They want work. They want contact. They want to do something.
Instead, they get: nothing. Coffee mugs. My phone. The same kitchen counter I’ve wiped down 4,000 times. Lady’s fur. The occasional doomed attempt at hydration.
There’s a specific kind of restlessness that comes with wanting to garden but not being able to yet. It’s not the same as laziness or procrastination—those imply choice. This is forced stillness. This is the ground itself saying: I’m not ready. You’ll have to wait.
Grief works the same way.
Two Februarys ago, Daisy was still alive. Not well—never well again after the tumor—but alive. We didn’t know yet that April would take her. February was still a month of hope, or at least the stubborn, exhausting pretense of it. We were still in the season of “maybe.” Maybe the treatment would work. Maybe we’d get more time. Maybe, maybe, maybe—the cruelest word in the English language. We didn’t yet know the cancer had spread.
Now, two years later, February is the month where I wait for April whether I want to or not. Time moves forward with the same indifference as the seasons. April is coming. The garden will wake. The dates will arrive: her death day on the 5th, her birthday on the 24th. And somewhere in between, I’m supposed to plant seeds and celebrate dirt and pretend the month that took her isn’t also the month that brings everything back to life.
I’m not ready. But February doesn’t care about that either. It just makes me wait.
People love to tell you what the garden teaches. Patience. Renewal. The cycle of life. As if loss and growth are part of some tidy spiritual curriculum, and if you just pay attention, you’ll learn to be at peace with it all.
The garden right now is doing its most essential work, even though it looks like it’s doing nothing. The perennials are underground, their roots slowly expanding in the cold. The bulbs I planted in November—late, reckless, very me—are down there too, undergoing the cold stratification they need to bloom. The soil itself is resting, rebuilding, composting last year’s rot into this year’s fertility.
Everything important is happening invisibly—which is what grief keeps insisting, and what I keep resisting because invisible work doesn’t always feel like work. It feels like nothing. It feels like I should be further along by now, like I should have something to show for two years of this. It sometimes feels like I’m failing—I can’t point to anything I’ve built or grown or fixed. I can’t show you the rows of “doing better” I’ve planted and tended and brought to fruit. I can’t harvest healing. I can’t dig my hands into measurable progress and say, look, here’s proof I’m not just treading water in the same dark pool.
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe February’s entire job is to make you sit in the discomfort of not knowing if anything is happening at all. To remind me that some of the most necessary growing happens when you can’t see it, can’t touch it, can’t speed it up by wanting it badly enough.
The ground has to freeze before it can thaw. The seeds have to wait in the dark before they split open. The roots have to rest before they can reach. And I have to live through February—again—before April arrives and asks whatever it’s going to ask.
I don’t know if the garden will feel like a gift or a betrayal when it wakes. I don’t know if planting seeds on her birthday will feel like hope or desecration. I don’t know if any of this waiting means I’m growing or just stuck.
But I know this: my hands still want dirt. And when the ground finally thaws, I’ll be there. That’s all February really asks. To wait. To trust nothing I can see. And to still be standing when it’s time to dig in again.
🤍
Beautiful, Bex.